Rook was an oddball, yes. But oddballs had their appeal for Anna. She liked the stimulation and surprise of men who lived beyond the grid. She liked Rook’s secrecy. She was not fooled by his sardonic ways. What kind of man, with power such as his, would spend the morning on the streets and come back laden with squashed cakes and a bunch of plastic leaves? A man worth knowing, she was sure. So Rook and Anna left it brewing in the air that their flirtations would bear fruit, and soon, before it was too late, before the heightened passion of the day, its sap, its colours and its scents had drained and dispersed for good. Let Victor have his birthday first. Let champagne loosen tongues and dilate hearts. Then let Rook and Anna stay on late, to sort out papers, say, to tidy up, to joust among themselves as the evening and the office blinds came down. They’d spoken not a word, but they were old and wise enough to comprehend the promise and the charge of ‘Such gallantry!’
Rook took the plastic branches, a roll of sticky tape, some string, into the office storeroom and began to fix them to the back-rest of an antique wooden chair. The moulded twig ends protruded through the spindles of the chair and made the decoration amateurish, and rushed. Rook tried to bite off lengths of string so that he could tie the twig ends back. But the string was just as tough and artificial as the greenery. He searched the shelves for scissors — and then remembered the knife he’d picked up in the tunnel, the flick-knife that the clumsy, birthmarked mugger in that too-large suit had dropped.
The too-large suit! The thought of it, ill-fitting, grimy, badly made, was all it took to solve the mystery of the second picture Rook had found amongst the debris in the pedestrian underpass. So that was what he’d recognized. Once more Rook found the piece of catalogue and scrutinized the faces and the bar. No other recognition, now. Except, bizarrely, for that suit. Rook smiled at On the Town, at its frugal price and style, at the implication that the early photograph of Rook himself had come not with pitch payments as he’d thought, but from the pockets of the young man’s suit. He’d been no chance encounter, then, but targeted. This lad had known, and God knows how, that he would carry cash in quantity between the old town and the new. But how the ageing photograph tied in with that he could not tell. Some opportunist soapie? Some maverick inside Big Vic? Some oddball with a pettifogging grudge? Who knows exactly who one’s foes might be?
Rook held the knife out, sprang the blade and set to work on cutting string and strapping back the plastic twigs. It was then he spotted the eleven worn letters scratched inexpertly on the handle, ‘JOSEPH’S NIFE’. He felt he’d like the chance to hand the flick-knife back, not to make amends for the kick he’d landed and the cheating fist of keys which had inflicted such a bloody face, but for the chance to find out who’d set this ‘Joseph’ up, and why. But for the moment he was glad to have the knife at hand, to put its blade to proper use for Victor and his chair. The decoration now was neater. Only leaves were on display. It looked as if the stained, antique wood of the chair, long dead, had undergone a resurrection of some kind, had put down roots and put out foliage, like the farmer’s magic chair of fairy tales. A little spit and polish was all it took to finish off the job. The spit took off the office dust. The polish — a Woodland-scented aerosol — put back the colour and the sheen. Rook’s handkerchief buffed up the waxen glimmer of the leaves.
He’d promised there’d be cats for Victor’s lunch. They were a part of Victor’s dream. The boss himself had three, to chase off pigeons from the roof. Rook had arranged that they should be brought down to the office suite. They’d settled in, two on the sofa, one underneath the desk. The tablecloth was white, exactly as required. The air-conditioning provided just sufficient breeze. In the visitors’ lobby the three musicians of the Band Accord were practising the country dances they would play for Victor. The fruit and cheeses were in place. The champagne was on ice. Rook went through to the inner room and Victor’s desk. He telephoned the chef. The perch were cooked and already steeped and cooling in the apple beer. The waitresses were standing by. The five old greengrocers were seated, subdued and patient, in the atrium below, waiting for the summons to the lift. Rook carried Victor’s birthday chair into the anteroom. He placed it with its back against a wall, so that the tiara of leaves faced into the room, and the disenchanting clutter of plastic, string and sticking tape could not be seen.
When the call came that lunch was ready to be served and that his friends — his guests — were already waiting in his suite, Victor was in his rooftop greenhouse on the 28th, examining the yellow aphids which congregated in a ruly crowd on the underleaves and along the infant stems, a congregation of busy wingless females plus a single ant which feasted on their honeyed excretions. Victor hesitated with his spray. He almost cared for insects more than plants — but not quite. These aphids were too common to be lovable. He showered them with toxic milk. The ant, he spared. How high, he wondered, would he have to build to rise beyond the pigeons and the flies, to reach above the aphids and the ants? Forty? Fifty storeys? Would there be oxygen enough up there for vegetables to thrive, for bees to come and pollinate his plants? He looked out through the lichened, mildewed glass, northwards, beyond the mall, the highway and the high-rise stores, towards the old town, and the suburbs, and the hills. Skyscrapers are the skyline optimists. They have the first light of the dawn, the final warmth of day. They get the flattened, cartographic view of towns, the neat geometry of north, south, east and west.
Victor knew his city like a hawk knows fields. The innards of the city were laid bare from the 28th floor, from what was once the Summit Restaurant of Big Vic but now, because the Summit diners could not stomach the swaying flexibility of skyscrapers in wind, was private garden. Innards are chaos and a mystery to any but the practised eye. In time, with study, Victor had got to know the spread-out entrails of the streets. He knew the bones and organs of the town — the university, the stadium, the graveyards, and the parks. He knew the Bunkers where poor, delinquent townies lived in blocks as packed as hives. He knew the yellows and the ochres of the public buildings, the grand works of the eighteenth-century trading potentates, the book-end buildings of the police headquarters where once the low-rise slums had been.
The routes and patterns were quite clear. No river — but a line of pylons and the railway halved the town, and link highways made a rhombus as a frame containing both these halves. The rhombus, in the midday summer heat, dangled from the city’s flight and swoop of motorways like a box which swings on ribbons. Beyond the box? The groundscraper mansions of the wealthy, crouching behind the thick masonry of security walls. The suburbs and their trees. Out-of-town commercial centres with fields of tarmac for the cars. A threatened cul-de-sac of countryside, earmarked as building land.
Victor liked the grey and green of boulevards the best, where lines of trees and central lawns plunged living splinters into the city’s skin. He liked the city humming to itself: the cheerful plumes of smoke which came from rubbish tips and factories and crematoriums, the distant drone of traffic, the cadences of wind.
The suburbs of the city from the 28th through Victor’s less than perfect eyes were patterned fabric, not quite alive, though shimmering like shot silk in greens and greys and browns. Nearer to the eye, the striped and garish awnings of the market, dignified only by the grey-green of the Soap Garden with its few two-storey trees, seemed capricious and unnatural, set at the centre of the old town’s patterned stratagems of startled roofs with their exclamatory chimney pots.